I was 16 years old and driving my parents' car when I stopped at a red light. Suddenly, I noticed a guy driving up a one-way street the wrong way, perpendicular to me. He started to inch out into the intersection and actually tapped my parents' car!

I started yelling at him. He yelled at me. Pretty soon we were both out of our cars, shouting in the middle of the street. Then he pushed me, and I pushed back.

I had been taking karate lessons for a few years. If I had remembered my karate training, I would not have let it escalate to the point of a physical fight. This guy was much bigger than me. I had no chance of winning using force against force, and winning pointless fights was not the purpose of my training anyway. But in the heat of the moment all I remembered were the karate kicks and punches I could land on this guy.

I did the stupidest thing I could have done. Just like you see in the movies, I did a supercool rear spinning back kick! Except unlike the movies, instead of this guy flying backward across the street with the breath knocked out off him, he immediately caught my leg and pile-drived me into the pavement. The fight was over in a few seconds. I lost, badly. After the cops showed up and spectators pulled us apart, he came over to apologize. I was too pissed off and embarrassed to even shake his hand.

What I Should Have Known

Not that I would recommend picking a fight with some road rage idiot, but that moment was a perfect lesson in the principles that underpin aikido. That fight was force against force, and the big guy had more force behind him. Instead of thinking about what I could leverage to win against this stronger force—or, even better, considering whether it made sense to start a fight at all—I rushed in aggressively with nothing but force on my side. And I lost. I still remember how that defeat felt. And it stung all the more because it never needed to happen in the first place.

If I had known then what I know now about the principles of aikido, I would have seen the entire fight in a completely different way.

Aikido is essentially a defensive martial art. Instead of thinking about how to defeat your opponent, you think about how to blend your energy with your opponent's. This concept underpins the entire discipline. It is part of the very word aikido. Ai () means blending, meeting, or harmonizing, and ki () means energy; together, they mean unifying with your opponent, rather than dominating them.

Harmony in Action

When you approach conflict in the spirit of aiki, you think about how to harmonize with the situation, so you can protect both yourself and your opponent. Instead of learning to kick and punch and strike and attack, you learn techniques to avoid and redirect your opponent's blows. You protect yourself from their attack, and you also protect your opponent by making the fight as fast and efficient as possible. You learn to leverage things in your environment, and in yourself, to overcome what is being thrown at you—instead of meeting force with force.

To succeed in the spirit of aiki (pronounced “eye-key”), you have to do two things, both of which I failed to do at that intersection when I was 16. First, you have to have the humility not to meet force with force, especially if you're facing a stronger opponent. This means clearly seeing your opponent and when necessary accepting that he is stronger. Then, you have to look for a way to use leverage instead of brute strength. This means you have to think on your feet and find ways to use your opponent's strength—or your own weakness—against them. Facing a fight this way requires self-awareness, and demands the use of your intelligence as much as your physical strength.

If I had known at 16 what I know now about how to harmonize with an attacker's energy, I could have handled the fight with a lot more dignity. I certainly would not have struck first with that ridiculous rear spinning back kick. Instead, I could have simply waited until the guy threw a punch at me—and then ducked. I could have easily avoided and then redirected his energy—to achieve aiki—instead of going unnecessarily on the attack.

Or, when he took a swing at me, I could have dropped down to one knee, hugged the guy's ankles, and leaned into his shins with my shoulder. It is simple leverage and a very basic aikido technique: If you hug an attacker's ankles so they cannot move, they will fall. It does not matter how tall they are, or how big they are, or how small you are. They will fall. Then, once he was down, I could have run away or gotten on top of the guy to hold him down until the cops came, or cooler heads prevailed. Using leverage means you do not have to be stronger than your attacker, just smarter, calmer, and more prepared.

Using Aiki in Daily Life

I was not smart enough at 16 to approach fights this way, but I have since been able to help other young people learn how to approach the battles in their lives from a spirit of aiki. A few years ago, one of my students, Alan, came to me with a problem. His 15-year-old son, Sean, who was also a student at my dojo, was being bullied at school. And Sean was not handling it well. He had a tendency to fly into a rage when these other kids made fun of him—just like 16-year-old me in that intersection, his instinct was to try to fight force with force. And because Sean has Asperger's syndrome, his dad was having real trouble figuring out how to talk to him about these problems.

Alan and I decided to leverage Sean's knowledge of aikido to help him see the situation in a new way. The three of us sat down on some mats in the dojo, and I asked Sean what he would do if a stronger opponent came at him with an aggressive move—would he try to fight back with an aggressive counterattack?

No, of course not, Sean said. He would use one of the defensive moves that would allow him to prevail with leverage instead of brute force. He would aim for aiki, unification, instead of domination.

I explained to Sean how the bullies at school were just like a stronger opponent in an aikido bout: They want you to respond with force, because they will beat you every time. But if you instead turn, use one of your defensive moves, and look for a way to apply leverage, you will prevail.

Leveraging the language of aikido worked. Alan and I were able to connect with Sean and help him find the aiki way to deal with bullies. In the end, Sean's Asperger's—the difference that those bullies saw as a weakness—became a source of strength for him. His Asperger's gave him an incredible ability to focus. So when the name-calling and bullying began, Sean leveraged his ability to focus by deliberately taking a deep breath to calm down, disengaging from the bullies, and walking away to go join his friends. Sean is now a sophomore in college, and I expect great things from him.

Try It Yourself

A similar technique will work wonders on bullies in the corporate world, too—the aggressive boss who tries to manage through fear, or the colleague who is always trying to push your buttons. Unfortunately, workplace bullying is all too common. A recent study by the Workplace Bullying Institute¹ found almost one in three Americans has experienced workplace bullying, and about one in five Americans has witnessed bullying in the workplace.

When a workplace bully confronts you, take a moment to think about what they want from you. They want to provoke you—to get that emotional reaction that proves that they are important and they have power over you. Do not make the mistake of fighting the force of their anger with the force of yours.

Instead, look for what you have to leverage, in both the short and long term. In the moment, stick to something simple and professional like, “I really want our project (or team, or company, or idea, or product/service, etc.) to succeed. Let me follow up with you.” Use 15 words or less. This will help you restrict their ability to keep attacking you and also redirect their energy. Remember to call upon your own innate gifts, even the ones that seem like weaknesses—the sense of humor that could help you defuse a tense situation, or the sensitivity that could help you see through the bully's eyes.

In the longer term, try to build a network of friendly colleagues to leverage for support when you need it. Make sure that you're taking care of your own emotional and physical health—stress can have a serious long-term impact on your mind and body. And lay the groundwork to take concrete action if you need to. Document the incidents of abusive behavior so you're prepared to talk to your superiors if needed. If you do decide to take this type of direct action, make sure you focus the conversation on the bottom line—how the bully is making the team/company/project less productive.

Your goal in dealing with a bully should be the same as Sean's—defuse the situation in the moment, and in the longer term, focus on preserving your own health above all. Don't meet the bully where they are. Don't fight their negative energy with your own.

Use What You Have

Successful business leaders use leverage all the time. Honda was the first Japanese car company to gain a real foothold in the U.S. market. But they did not even start making cars until the 1960s, while their domestic competitors like Toyota and Nissan had been in the business since before World War II. To this day, Honda is actually one of the least-respected automobile brands in its native Japan. Honda is basically the brand you buy if you cannot afford a Toyota, or a Nissan, or a Mitsubishi, or a Subaru.

So how did they get from nowhere to the huge success of the Civic in the early ‘70s to the Accord in the ‘80s and ‘90s and now the CRV and other great Honda models? In the spirit of aiki, they decided to blend with the situation instead of meeting force with force. Rather than trying to overpower their bigger opponents at home, they went abroad. They leveraged the one advantage they did have: an existing manufacturing and distribution network in America, thanks to their earlier success selling lightweight motorcycles in the U.S. market.

They also essentially leveraged their ignorance. Because they were starting from scratch when it came to consumer cars, they drew ideas from everywhere, including race cars, to create the CVCC engine that helped make the Civic both cleaner and cheaper than competing models. That allowed them to blend harmoniously with new emissions regulations that looked like huge obstacles to other manufacturers.

Honda was not stronger than their domestic competitors, but they were more creative and better at using their few small advantages to create outsize success.

The Road Less Traveled

In the 1990s, I was working as a consultant in Japan, helping Western companies set up operations and tap into the Japanese market. It was not an easy job. Japan is notoriously difficult for outsiders to understand, and it tends to be a hostile market for foreign products, especially consumer products. The Japanese consumer is, quite simply, different than the Western consumer, with different tastes and priorities. As a result, many Western companies struggle to connect with them.

When Gallo Wine came to my firm for help reaching Japanese consumers, I knew we were not starting from a position of strength. At the time, Japanese people did not drink Western wine. And the country's supermarkets were part of the network of large business conglomerates known as keiretsu that dominated the Japanese economy at the time. These companies were tightly interwoven with each other and financially invested in one another's success. There was no way we were going to get an unfamiliar product from overseas on these supermarkets' shelves. We couldn't succeed through brute force; we needed an aiki solution.

The traditional ways of doing business in Japan were not going to work in this case. So we made a virtue of our newness. Instead of trying to get inside the old, established networks, we specifically looked for people who were not a part of those networks. We hired young Japanese men in their early 20s who were a bit on the fringes of society—guys who were just a little bit quirky, a little bit nontraditional—guys who were not working for one of those big conglomerates, and did not want to. In a society where a job in a keiretsu was the ultimate badge of success, we leveraged these outsiders' desire to prove themselves.

We could not make connections at the top, so we made a virtue of working from the bottom of the market up. We sent these young salesmen out to make connections with little mom-and-pop stores that were not part of the big conglomerates. As a result, Gallo Wine spread through the country in a way that felt organic and natural. Instead of being imposed from some kind of central authority top-down, Gallo came into Japan in hundreds of small, unique neighborhood stores.

And it took off. The product flew off the shelves. The stores we worked with could not keep it in stock. Gallo's success started a huge red wine boom in Japan—and it never would have happened if we had not figured out how to turn the company's core weakness into a source of strength.

Start with Self-Awareness

In America these days, most of us have been brought up to believe that we can do anything we can dream of. As an entrepreneur, I have definitely been influenced by this idea, for good or ill. It has encouraged me to pursue my dreams and push myself to succeed, but it has also led me to take on too much and wait too long to ask for help.

The principle of aiki is about unifying and blending your energy with your opponent's. In order to do this, you must start from a place of clear-eyed self-awareness. After all, if you don't assess your own energies and skills realistically, you're rushing into battle unprepared. If you believe you can do anything, if you think you are invincible, you may end up like 16-year-old me in the middle of that intersection: throwing yourself at a stronger opponent you cannot possibly defeat with force alone. It takes some humility to acknowledge that you might not be able to succeed just by trying your hardest. It takes some self-awareness to confront your weaknesses and build them into your plan for success.

So how do you get into that mind-set—the mind-set that allows you to analyze the situation and figure out, realistically, what you can and cannot accomplish?

You have to start by emptying your mind of distraction and worry. For many of us, thinking about our weaknesses can kick-start a downward spiral of anxiety. Others will too quickly jump to their own defense—“No, I do not have any experience in that field, but I'm a quick learner!” Your goal is to evaluate yourself and your resources realistically and dispassionately. And that means entering into your self-evaluation process with a clear mind.

Attaining clarity is the most important tool you have in any endeavor. Achieving true clarity can take years of practice. But you do not have to get there overnight. You can start small. For example, I take a few minutes every morning to write in a journal—it literally takes only five minutes. I just jot down a few things that are on my mind, things I am thinking or feeling, goals for the day, whatever comes to mind.

You may also find it helpful to talk to trusted colleagues or friends about your potential blind spots—weaknesses you don't know you don't know that are holding you back from success and balance. (Think about that for a second.) Other perspectives are always useful, of course, and your friends may sometimes see things you have not, but I believe the real answers are always inside you. You just have to learn to quiet your mind enough that you can see them.

So talk to a few friends, and then bring their list of weaknesses or problems to one of those journaling sessions. Reflect on what others have said and run those ideas through the deepest, quietest part of your mind. Ask yourself, is this true? Is this a real problem? Will this really hold me back?

Aiki is about unifying your energy with your opponent's, rather than meeting force with force. It's about fighting smarter, not harder—assessing your own strength and your opponent's, and then determining how to proceed. Only once you have confronted your weaknesses can you start figuring out how to work around them—or turn them into strengths.

Embrace Your Weaknesses

Brandi Temple of Lexington, North Carolina was not the strongest entrepreneurial fighter when she started her children's clothing business, Lolly Wolly Doodle, back in 2009. In fact, she started from a position of real weakness—her business was little more than a hobby when her husband's construction business started faltering and the family needed a new source of income. She knew almost nothing about online commerce. She had barely even used Facebook in her personal life. Yet by 2013, Lolly Wolly Doodle was an $11 million business,⁴ attracting millions in venture capital funding and claiming to sell more physical products directly on Facebook than any other company in the world.

How did she do it? It started with her simply posting her handmade dresses for sale on Lolly's Facebook page and asking her fans to leave an e-mail address if they wanted to purchase one. She would then e-mail them an invoice via PayPal. A company that literally started in a garage was soon seen by investors as a potential multibillion-dollar brand.

How did she succeed where much stronger companies failed? JCPenney, for example, opened an in-Facebook online store in 2010 and closed it about a year later as a failed experiment. Other brands, including Gap, Nordstrom, and GameStop, also opened and then abandoned in-Facebook stores, finding that they weren't getting sufficient return on their investment in the experiment. Facebook commerce had been hailed as a potential $30 billion market, but most companies found that their customers wanted to keep their online shopping and socializing separate.

Temple did not try to overpower anybody. She did not attack the problem with brute force. She looked for ways to blend harmoniously with her environment. She leveraged the strengths she did have in order to create surprising success. In fact, she turned some of her weaknesses into strengths.

She was not particularly trendy or fashion-forward in her designs. Temple started out making cute but modest clothing for her own daughters to wear to church—a classic case of an entrepreneur succeeding by filling a genuine need she has experienced herself. Her customers responded to her designs precisely because they were so different from the pieces they could find in major stores. By embracing her lack of fashion savvy, she turned it into a unique strength for her brand.

She did not have a big marketing engine. She could not buy advertising to promote her brand. So she started posting her handmade dresses for sale on her Facebook page. Her lack of a marketing budget became a strength, because these offers felt like an organic part of her customers' Facebook newsfeeds, as opposed to an intrusion from a big, impersonal corporation. Essentially, she approached her customers as friends and allies instead of as targets—and as they commented on and shared her posts, they became her marketing team.

Temple also did not have much manufacturing capacity. She just had herself, her family, and some friends from church, sewing clothing in her garage. But the fact that she did not have a factory to manufacture mass quantities of dresses meant she and her team were making all their products to order, allowing them to quickly tweak their products, or make more or less of something, based on day-to-day demand. When a design sold well, she would quickly churn out a dozen variations.

Even now that the company has expanded, they are still using this same basic strategy to keep their initial outlay on a new design low and remain responsive to their market: Test small, and make a lot of something only after it has been proven to sell. What started out as the company's only option has become its best option, and its differentiating strength.

They are growing quickly now—they actually doubled their revenue several years in a row—but I would bet on Lolly Wolly Doodle and Temple to continue to succeed, precisely because they are sticking to the nimble, responsive tactics that enabled them to win from a weak position.

Adapt, Improvise, and Overcome

The Marine Corps is the smallest fighting force in the U.S. military. They also have the smallest budget. But they turn that weakness into a huge advantage. They are the few and the proud. They aim to do the most with the least resources.

So how do they do it? Discipline is important for anyone in the military, but Marines are taught to achieve their goal by any means possible. So you have to follow orders, but you also have to think for yourself and work as a team. Young Marines are given lots of responsibility, more than young recruits in other branches of the military, because at some point they will be out in the field, responsible for completing their mission no matter what happens.

Early on in our training, we learned land navigation. Your team is given this cumbersome compass, and you learn how to shoot an azimuth, or calculate an angle based off of true north, in order to make sure you are heading in exactly the right direction. There is a bit of math involved, but basically, you calculate the angle between two reference points, and a Marine goes and stands at the end of the line you are projecting (the azimuth), and then you all walk over to that Marine and you keep plotting forward from there.

Easy enough, right? Well, sure, in the middle of the day in a nice, open meadow, land navigation is fine. But when you have to do it in the dead of night in 6-foot-tall elephant grass, you literally could not see your hand in front of your face.

How would you navigate your way out of that situation?

That is what the Marine Corps teaches you. And in a different way, it is what aikido teaches, too—stay calm, stay focused, and look for something you can leverage to come up with a solution. Don't try to meet force with force. Unify your energy with your opponent's. Adapt, improvise, and overcome.

Do Your Own Self-Assessment

Do you see your own weaknesses clearly enough to build a workable plan? When you are starting a new business or a new project, you need to be asking yourself, do I have the connections I need to get attention for this project? Do I have the social skills to sell it? Do I know enough about the market I am trying to work in? Do I have the storytelling skills to make this project compelling to potential partners and customers?

Try starting from the ideal and working your way down to the real. Look at every aspect of your project and imagine what it would look like if you were perfectly positioned to succeed. Think about your strongest competitor—what advantages do they have? Maybe, in an ideal world, you would have the elegant design of Apple and the lightning-fast turnaround times of Amazon. Maybe you would have an MBA. Maybe you would have a massively popular blog with a devoted following of commenters.

Focus on the areas where you instinctively feel like your real is farthest from your ideal. Maybe the new product you are trying to launch is not as elegant as an iPhone, but it is well designed—and your bigger weakness is slow customer service, because you do not have much manpower to throw at the problem. Or maybe you are a good enough networker, but you have always been uncomfortable promoting yourself on social media. Maybe you are okay without an MBA, but you do not know any other entrepreneurs, and your underdeveloped network is your biggest weakness.

The idea is not to wallow in self-doubt—far from it. Ultimately, your goal is to let your examination of your weaknesses help you start brainstorming your strengths. Once you know what you cannot do, you will be able to start to see what you can do. And you'll start to see how to unify your energy with your opponent's.

One simple way to start turning your weaknesses around is to come up with a corresponding strength for each of them. Researchers from New York University recently found that associating a weakness with a positive “silver lining” improves your performance in the area of that particular strength. In other words, if you admit that you tend to be impulsive, but you tell yourself impulsive people are more creative, you will actually become more creative.

Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Group, has done exactly this with his dyslexia. He has said that growing up, his teachers thought he was lazy because he was slow to read and complete assignments. Now he considers this weakness his greatest strength. He has come to associate his dyslexia with his ability to delegate and surround himself with the best people. He has said that he learned early to focus on doing the things he was best at, like creative thinking, and delegate the things he was not good at.

Branson is not the most humble guy in the world. But he certainly has seen the value of acknowledging his weaknesses and finding ways to work around them. And it is hard to argue with his outstanding success. What are your personal weaknesses? How could you turn them into strengths?

Finding a Way

Aikido teaches its practitioners to use leverage rather than brute force. We use leverage because it is the swiftest, most compassionate, most harmonious, and most efficient way to subdue a stronger opponent and end a fight.

We have already talked about how Honda managed to leverage their motorcycle distribution network to crack the U.S. car market. But that network would never have existed in the first place if a few executives had not displayed clear-minded, dispassionate awareness in their first visit to America in 1959.

They did not start from a position of strength. There were only three of them, renting a single furnished apartment in Los Angeles. Two of them were sleeping on the floor to save money. They arrived to try to conquer a market dominated by Harley-Davidson and a couple of European manufacturers at the end of the summer—just when Americans stop thinking about buying motorcycles. They had not known the business was seasonal. In fact, they knew so little about the U.S. market that their boss, Mr. Soichiro Honda, thought that the fact that the handlebars on one of their biggest bikes kind of looked like the Buddha's moustache would be a big selling point.

They also did not know that their machines were not built to conquer America's wide-open spaces. Designed for use in Japanese cities, even their largest, most Buddha's-moustache-like machines broke down and leaked oil when driven as far and as fast as American bikers liked to drive.

It would have been easy for the three Honda execs who had been sent to LA to panic. But they kept their minds open to their surroundings. They looked at their own situation with clear eyes and a willingness to try anything. And they drove their own little, lightweight Honda motorcycles around L.A. And people started to notice them.

Those little Honda Supercubs became Honda's entry point into the U.S. market. They initially sold in retail sporting goods stores, not traditional dealerships. They sold to mainstream young people, not the traditional biker in a black leather jacket. The Supercub was not suitable for the long distances most bikers liked to ride—but that weakness actually made it much better suited to appeal to a completely new demographic. Honda aggressively marketed to this new demographic, and by 1964, about half of all motorcycles sold were Hondas—paving the way for the company's later success in the automobile market.

None of that success would have been possible if those three executives had not been able to put aside their preconceptions about how motorcycles had to be sold, along with their fears of failure, and stay open to what was happening around them. If they had clung to the idea of competing for the traditional bike-buying customer, if they had not been able to face their weaknesses and start working on creative solutions, they would not have sold any motorcycles—and Honda never would have become the American success story it is today.